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It’s great to see RIM shaking things up and challenging the same tired narrative that the media loves to repeat ad nauseum (ie “the hardware spec race is worth fighting” and “the number of apps on your platform dictates success”). At Mobile World Congress, Alec Saunders, VP of Developer Relations at RIM, gave some interesting sound bites including 500,000 apps and a 41MP camera are “meaningless”. It’s a good point that gives a little insight into how RIM is tackling the app ecosystem. Rather than concern yourself with building a platform to attract massive amounts of duplicates and fluff, build a platform that will entice the best of the best. That being said, lots of choice is always great, and duplicates isn’t so bad if you’re providing a variety of features and price points.Continue reading ‘Alec Saunders, RIM Dev Relations, Says 500K Apps and a 41MP Camera Are Meaningless’

The Spanish startup Yuilop is getting a lot of coverage lately as they’ve secured 1 million euros in seed funding from Nauta Capital and they’re entering a pretty hot market. Yuilop sounds like it takes a lot of elements from both group messaging apps, SocialScope and even Skype. The platform, while very much in stealth mode, seems to aggregate traditional and social messaging systems into a single app. The company also plans on offering a Skype-style yuilop-to-yuilop free voice chat feature.

The company supports or plans to support Android, iOS, Symbian and BlackBerry. Any German BlackBerry users have access to this app? Let us know.

Head over to yuilop.com and sign up to be notified when this app launches.

Android has leap-frogged Windows Mobile and Linux now represents 10 percent of smartphones shipped. Nokia has declined by 4.5 percentage points to 44.3 percent as sales rose by one-third, lagging behind the market’s growth. The iPhone is the third most popular smartphone after Symbian and RIM, with a 15.4 percent share of handsets that are open to third-party applications.

Smartphones now account for 17.3 percent of the industry’s phone sales, and Nokia reported last month that smartphones accounted for about 20 percent of its volume in the first quarter.

For example, carriers are going to put an increasing amount of pressure on hardware manufacturers to be efficient with data. Apple have been pretty greedy when it comes to network consumption and if they lose the carriers’ confidence, we’ll be seeing the carriers’ marketing dollars shifting to BlackBerry. RIM are also going to see a tremendous amount of growth globally, while Apple are too rigid in pricing to be effective outside of first world countries. It’s safe to say that the next few years are going to be very interesting.

Gartner has released a slightly revised version of their outlook for the 2012 mobile operating system. The latest predictions put Symbian as the top OS, followed by Android, with BlackBerry in third and iPhone in fourth.

The interesting part of this research is the positioning of BlackBerry relative to the iPhone. The advantage of BlackBerry is that it will always have enough devices to cover the entire gamut of potential smartphone users. While you may not love every device that RIM ships, there will always be a device for you.

While Gartner believes that Open Source OS markets are the future, we aren’t seeing much proof of this. Developers aren’t making enough money on either platform for the devices to be of much of use. We have said this countless times on BlackBerry Cool, it’s the software that determines the winner and hardware is fast becoming secondary with regards to the competitiveness of a device.

While we may not know the final outcome until 2012, rest assured it’s the developers who will decide the final victor. So if you’re a developer looking to make that killer app, don’t let Gartner become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Go to the brand you trust and ultimately, go to the brand that’s making you money. I guarantee you it’s not Symbian, Android or Windows Mobile.